Suicide by Technology

One Data Center at a Time

A mailing I recently received about the latest data center in my area - and all the “benefits” that will trickle down from it - hit home, literally, and forced me to put into words the emotions I’ve been feeling over the rapid proliferation of data centers across the landscape.

It’s definitely grief - and not just over the waste, destruction, and ecocide - but over our impending preventable suicide by technology, happening one more data center at a time, one more distraction at a time, and one more facet of control wielded over us at a time, all coming at us faster than we can comprehend or react to (if we even notice or care).

It’s not that I was fine with all the other mindless, blind, perverse, and irreversible ways we squander finite land, energy, and resources in our race to expand and consume what’s left - the constant onslaught of retail, manufacturing, residential, energy, and transportation development - but data centers are beyond the pale.

Data centers aren't just another form of tumor - they're the tumor that confirms the disease is terminal.

It’s all for something insidious that the vast majority of us don’t want or need, didn’t ask for, and appear to have zero say over.

The insane quantities of hallucinated money funding data centers - based on hallucinated share prices, hallucinated asset values, and hallucinated market potential - is a temporary situation. Unfortunately, the data centers are permanent, even long after they've been abandoned.

Who among us were dying to have as much ai as we could cram into our lives, at work, at home, everywhere, all the time, let alone deem it worthy of being yet another thing that steamrolls our local communities and landbases?

Data centers are at the vanguard of the ever-accelerating destruction of what remains of a world worth living in, including our humanity. This is a price no one can pay, and only a civilization as sick, insane, and desperate as ours would think the “benefits” are worth that cost, then go all-in on it.

We’ve not only been lulled into believing ai is our friend, helper, and partner (weren’t there already real living breathing people for that?), but that ai powers itself and therefore doesn’t require vast amounts of energy beyond your phone’s battery, and that ai exists in the apps on your phone, and therefore doesn’t require vast amounts of physical space and resources, including nearby fresh, clean water.

A society where we don’t know or care what the true costs of energy and resources are or where these come from, where we are taught that technology will always find a way (so don’t get in its way), and where we believe there is either an endless supply or there will always be substitutes (up to and including substitute planets), can be fooled into believing anything, even the latest lies that tell us ai exists for us, is for the common good, and will improve or even save the world.

For now, the true costs are hidden and externalized, but when we’re all seeing, hearing, feeling, and grieving data centers through the course of our everyday lives, we’ll no longer be able to ignore the astronomical costs of ai, since those costs will no longer be able to be hidden or externalized.

We’ll pay those costs directly in a multitude of ways we cannot even begin to imagine, long after the tech bros and their investors make their killing (literally and figuratively) and pull out.

By then it will be too late, if it isn’t already.

We’ll be unable to separate or distinguish the digital representations of our lives - continually captured and replicated across multiple data centers - from our actual lives, and we’ll be powerless to deal with the irrevocable peril that puts us in. As the rate of data center proliferation increases, so does the rate at which we relinquish our already rapidly dwindling psychological and economic freedoms to ai.

That is, if we’re not already at that point.

Now for the happy ending, if there can be one:

When the ai/data center hype bubble that’s propping up the rotting core of our economy bursts, perhaps it will take ai and future data centers with it to the abyss.

When ai reveals itself unable to offer us anything we actually want, need, or can’t already do for ourselves (and enslaves us for the privilege), perhaps it will become a digital pariah whose very existence nauseates us (but only after we find out the hard way it wasn’t worth losing everything we gave up for it).

When we wake up to this and everything else closing in and choking the world, perhaps the senseless and ceaseless expansion of ai for ai’s sake will grind to a halt before a data center opens within view of your front window or mine.

At least that’s what I tell myself to continue living in an increasingly unrecognizable world where no one I know needs, works for, or wishes for ai.